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Ballad of the Long Sought Shift to Being Educable, Not Educated: Adaptation Via Dissolving the Logical Mind

Do you ever wonder where these titles come from? The second part comes from descriptions in the 2004 book The Great Adventure: Toward a Fully Human Theory of Evolution that I will end this post with. First it described eliminating the “bricks and mortar” of the tradition-oriented logical mind. Later, the same book, having laid out its plans on using K-12 education to get a more “flexible,” intuitive, mind, then proceeded to describe how to lock those changes firmly and invisibly in place. Long term readers can probably guess that those changes will be hidden in the real definitions of Student ‘Growth’ and ‘achievement’ and whether the student is showing progress to being Workplace or College and Career Ready. The techniques used to dissolve that logical mind and practice new behaviors come in using strategies created in the classroom via activities billed to parents as ‘rigorous’ and involving ‘Higher Order Thinking Skills.”

It all links together. Let’s go back to the 1960s first to a professor, Philip H. Coombs, who also served in the Kennedy administration before bolting for Paris to help UNESCO (the UN entity created in 1948 for the express purpose of using education globally to gradual shift culture away from the West’s historic focus on the individual as my book explains) set up its International Institute for Educational Planning. In 1967 President Johnson, a former elementary teacher with a life-long reverence for John Dewey (the reason that matters is also in the book), initiated an International Conference on the World Crisis in Education in Williamsburg, Virginia. The resulting book The World Educational Crisis pointed out that K-12 needed to “expand and democratize itself and that keeping “the old logistics, curriculum, and hallowed monolithic standards” would be:

“as if a specialized gift shop for the well-to-do was summoned to convert itself into a massive department store for consumers of every description, including a thrift basement for those in straitened circumstances.”

Now, of course, all students are being asked to accept to offerings of the thrift basement. Elaborate name changes and unknown initiatives as we saw in the last post simply obscure the dramatic shift. Interestingly, it all still fits with what LBJ, Coombs, and UNESCO all wanted back in 1968 (italics in original text; bolding from me):

“Educational systems must undergo a shift of emphasis. The new stress must be not so much on producing an educated person as on producing an educable person who can learn and adapt himself efficiently all through his life to an environment that is ceaselessly changing.”

That’s the new goal of K-12 education in the West, which is why the academic results have been deteriorating ever since. Those insiders who know the real reason cannot remain empowered to bring about the change desired via the schools if they admit to what is going on. People like me now, who know and can prove the reality, always run up against parents who cannot bear to know. The problem is these sought changes are psychological and the Common Core in the US and 21st century skills everywhere mask that reality.

Continued ignorance means that techniques that really are grounded in acknowledged brainwashing techniques are being imposed on teachers and students in our classrooms. Let’s continue our journey to examine how crucial this ability to have an adaptable mind and personality is to those who really want wholesale political, social, and economic change. Always seeking ambitious administrators willing to impose this on classrooms.

Around 1986, just after the 1985 agreement on education among the US, USSR, and the Carnegie Corporation (the same one Richard Riley is now a Vice Chair of that is now pushing Competency-Based Next Generation Learning to guide the real global shift) was signed (www.americandeception.com is a good source for the actual document), a study began under the banner of the US Department of Labor. It produced in 1990 a series of Workplace Basics, Training for a Changing Workforce, manuals that provide the actual Blueprint still being followed in today’s K-12 education reforms. The longest and most graphic of the books on The Essential Skills Employers Want lays out the need for students and employees to “transcend logical and sequential thinking and make the leap to innovation.”

Where have we heard that hostility to the Axemaker Mind before? Paul Ehrlich’s 1989 pitch for Newmindedness. What a timely coincidence. Now tell me if this quote from the 1990 manual does not sound like today’s sales pitch for a Growth Mindset, instead of a Fixed Mindset? “Each adult brings a different personal data base of experience and learning to the workplace. This base cannot remain static because our lives are a caldron of experiments responding to the need to adapt to changing circumstances.” Students in school are to be targeted for change for the same reason. Analytical, rule-based thinking like traditional algebra, geometry proofs, or grammar all impede this desired adaptability. It is fascinating to me that the professor, Lauren Resnick, who created the terms ‘rigor’ and Higher Order Thinking Skills back in the 80s is quoted by name in the book making this point:

“School should focus its efforts on preparing people to be good adaptive learners, so they can perform effectively [aka be competent or proficient] when situations are unpredictable and task demands change.”

The now-ubiquitous goal that Students should Learn How to Learn is also in the 1990 manual of new Workplace Basics. It goes back to citing notorious Humanist psychologist Carl Rogers and his 1969 book Freedom to Learn to illustrate the concept of Learning to Learn: “The only man who is educated is the man who has learned how to learn…how to adapt and change.”

I had a reader recently who also teaches ask me how the omnipresent concept of ‘problem-solving’ under the Common Core differed from the classic (if painful) classic math word problems. Let’s use the still relevant definition from the 1990 manual: “Problem solving is the process of bridging a perceived gap between what is and what ought to be.” A very useful skill indeed along with adaptability if fundamental transformations are the real goal and education and people have become mere conduits or tools to effect the sought changes. Here’s another useful tool: the POWER Model of Problem Solving.

Project a vision of how the situation should be different

Observe the discrepancy between what exists and what should be

Work out, after considering choices, an action plan and implement it

Evaluate/monitor progress and achievement

Revise plans as indicated by evaluation findings

As someone who has read many of the blueprints involved over the decades with these sought transformations, that POWER model is precisely what Big Data and supercomputers and governments at all levels think is the new way to plan societies and economies. Education at all levels simply needs to produce the people with mindsets and worldviews to either tolerate the wholesale shifts or to embrace them. Both involve dissolving the logical mind of the Enlightenment and believe me, the advocates just keep saying that.

Interestingly too, here is the new definition of leadership. Notice how useful this will be to bringing about wholesale change, especially when it becomes the entire basis for graduate degrees, as in education or public policy doctorates.

“The most successful leader of all is one who sees another picture not yet actualized. He sees the things which belong in his present picture but which are not yet there.”

Now imagine if a willingness to ‘problem solve’ using the POWER Model or be a leader as described above gets you lucrative jobs or grants from massively rich charitable foundations or public sector jobs where promotions are tied to how aggressively you push this transformational vision to make students ‘adaptable’ and ‘trainable.’ You would get precisely what is going on now as this Next Generation Learning graphic across all sectors and institutions from Ford makes clear. https://fordngl.com/sites/fordpas.org/files/ford_ngl_three_strands_graphic_0.pdf

On July 17 and 19, 2000 there was a meeting of so many of the long time advocates for transformation social and political change using education in Toronto, Canada. They laid out their plans to use a “teacher-student-driven, globally active alliance between evolutionary systems science and humanistic, transpersonal, and positive psychology to kick-start what is needed.”

What was needed, of course, is that very same adaptability and malleable mind and personality we just keep encountering as the new goal of education. To be educable, not educated. Learning how to Learn and Growth sound so much better than the real goals of a “radical expansion of brain, mind, and consciousness” that will allow step-by-step achievement of “personal, cultural, social, political, economic, educational, and technological evolution.” The term revolution probably better describes what is sought, but since these fundamental changes are all supposed to be bloodless, evolution sounds better. Plus it fits the invisible shifts involved over time until the dramatic changes over time can be locked into place.

How? Through a moral and spiritual transformation in what enough people to be the majority electorate value and believe about how the world works, what they are owed by others, and what the world should be.

David Loye in that The Great Adventure book laid out “how to actually build it.” Next time we will trace that blueprint against the real implementation. It started last week where I live.

Unless you want the next generation to remain psychological adaptation guinea pigs, this is something all parents and taxpayers need to know. This is no time for rose-colored glasses.

60 thoughts on “Ballad of the Long Sought Shift to Being Educable, Not Educated: Adaptation Via Dissolving the Logical Mind”

“…the need for students and employees to “transcend logical and sequential thinking and make the leap to innovation.”

Now, I know I’m preaching to the choir here, however, anyone who knows anything about the human Mind, Spirit and Will and who truly desires seeing a human soul thrive from K-12 and beyond knows that ONLY in developing and practicing logical and sequential reasoning can human intuition and inspiration for innovation find its footing.

The mental silos built by practiced logical thinking provide the structural framework within the individual mind that then supports creativity and imagination.

I know you know this Robin. It is no secret and I’m simply stating what I think of as obvious. But to think that so many people are buying this nonsense, that logic and facts are a hindrance to creativity, is unbelievably naive and silly to me.

These planners descended from Dewey know fully well that without logic and facts there will be few imaginations that will create much of anything grounded in usefulness, much less reality. They know that without logic that they will have an educable population who will wait to be enlightened as to their next move by their betters. They know that the educable imaginative serfs will pose little competitive threat to the existing planners’ businesses.

and this:

“… the real goals of a “radical expansion of brain, mind, and consciousness” that will allow step-by-step achievement of “personal, cultural, social, political, economic, educational, and technological evolution.”

Expansion of the brain, mind, and consciousness? More like Shrinking I’d say. The opposite and upside down , Orwellian use of language by these folks galls me to no end. The LIES!

One of the things I see clearly now from my own childhood experience with what was a certainly ‘progressive’ Quaker education in the 70’s and 80’s but still based in sound logic, reasoning, and facts, is that these Planners have been infiltrating society via education at the level of language for an exceptionally long time.

I remember as far back as 1975 that my Quaker school was pitching the meme that they were teaching us students to ” learn to learn or to be lifelong learners”. Now, this belief has value if a student is being taught facts and logic as the basis for everything else.. Back in 1975 this was still the case in my school. So the words seemed to support actual learning because we were not graduating as brain dead zombies.

When my husband was teaching school in the early 1990’s this Learning to Learn was still bandied about in private schools and at least in most private schools no one was seeing evidence to suggest the phrase was dangerous in any way. But I do remember that there was increased meaninglessness behind it. It had become part of the Private School lexicon or code of inclusion speak. Repeated ad nauseum for 20 years so that it seemed if not meaningless just sort of sweet.

It would appear that like any classically trained disinformation (change) agents, these Planners inveigled themselves into the system pretending to want one thing while clearly having designs for something else entirely. Language and labels have been the keys that have unlocked the doors to the principals offices and board meetings. The agents come in appearing to want what the parents want and they use words that initially mean what they say until from overuse and outright lies they mean the opposite of what people think.

We serfs do not want to imagine we have been so deliberately LIED to for so very very long.

Speaking of the mandated Orwellian confabulation of language ..check this out…..

I know what you mean about the kooky sites. There is great need for fact checking these days.
I understand why this law would give you pause. There are many who take concern with it and many of the Christian faith take concern with it as well. The paths to it and from it are a little convoluted and it does involve many aspects. First there is the economic side, maybe not the right word for it .On one hand you have the aspect of communitarianism like you said. Communitarianism being the compromise between Capitalism and Communism, not being fully fascist or fully communistic in nature, taking in aspects of Globalism as well, if I understand it correctly. Communitarianism also goes by the term The Third Way. Communitarianism ties to Amatai Etzioni (born a German Jew named Warner Falk) whom Robin has written about. Etzioni has said that through Communitarianism will come a central global government, most call the NWO. Communitarian or the idea of community spirit is in part based on the kabballah some say and talmudic law. (I am certainly no expert) This can be tracked back to the works of Crowley and Blavatsky, who were occultists.
When we get that far into the personal faith of those who also dabble in political theory we then cross over to where it has impact on those of faith in current times.
I do not have a lot of knowledge on the ins and outs of the Jewish faith, but I do know that they reject the idea that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah and believe that the Messiah has yet to come. So now, if we reflect back on the Noahide laws, the worship of Christ by Christians would be considered idolatry. This is where some believe that this paves the way for the persecution of Christians in the end times. I believe this has impact in the church today through movements like generous justice, and seeker sensitive. I am like Robin the fact that I am not a conspiracy minded person, but proven coordinated efforts are hard to deny. I do believe the Bible and see most of these changes as growing pains for what has been foretold.
Not sure if that helped or not. This is certainly a different side of things. As my good friend would say, we went down the rabbit hole (scary research) for awhile.

Etzioni is far more than just the communitarian visionary whose works get cited in the supporting research for what is to constitute a Positive School Climate. He was Chair of the Sociology Department at Columbia U before moving the GWU. It is interesting that the dedication in his 1988 book The Moral Dimension: Towards a New Economics is to Minerva Etzioni, who died in 1985. He heralds her “commitment to transcendental causes.”

That book is where all the language about “responsive community” comes from that gets turned into SEL programs to create “responsive classrooms.” See why I read the whole book? I a slo have his An Immodest Agenda: Rebuilding America Before the 21st Century.

Hence all the urgency to do all these transformations concurrently now. The old WOMP paradigm is still in play and about 20 years off schedule. My research indicates that although Carnegie and Rockefeller financed WOMP originally. From the mid-80s on, they seem to emphasize different interlocking components of the same previous vision.

All this insistence on consensus and dialogue to get a required shared understanding goes back to what Richard Falk originally laid out. Remember also I have been able to find proof that Gorbachev became interested in WOMP in about 1986 and there was a conference in Moscow in 1988 that produced a book I reread this week before writing yesterday’s post.

Take a look at this. Riley is speaking on character building, with a
Communitarian network banner behind him. He is introduced by an incredibly creepy William Galston, now with Bookings. What a cozy little collusion bed they all rest in.http://www.c-span.org/video/?65246-1/building-character

One thing Coombs and Carnevale were very familiar with, as was Lenin for that matter, is the political transformation potential of what they called the “educated unemployed.” These demands of credentials for all mean the credential means little. I believe much of Carnevale’s current advocacy work that gets cited as scholarship simply comes from his previous advocacy for a dominant public sector. At least that book Living in a Socialist USA was honest that the truth is a drastically lower standard of living for most people. It’s like the people who advocated for Obamacare believing they would get to go to the Mayo for free. Instead we are looking at a decline over time of medical specializing at all and what is available is far more expensive.

http://www.biu.ac.il/soc/se/burg/participance_english.html shows Galston at a UNESCO conference. It says he went to the University of Maryland after the Clinton Years. That means he would have been working with Gar Alperowitz of the Democracy Collaborative and Judith Torney-Punta who is involved with CIRCLE and the global Civics campaign I wrote about in the book. Torney-Punta is also behind the service learning for all push and was a contributor to the James Becker/ John Goodlad Schooling for a Global Age I cited to numerous times in the book.

Then Judith V Torney, she was at U-Illinois-Chicago and wrote Chapter 3 on “Psychological and Institutional Obstacles to the Global Perspective in Education.” Still controversial, the answer of course is to hide it as Character Ed, Whole Child Education, Competencies, and civics education.

I wonder if these new learning techniques and tricks were first implemented in the fancy private schools!?!? To unsuspecting parents who figured they were sending their kids to safe schools since paying such exorbitant tuitions!!!

I think based on my own education and from what I have seen of my kids in private school that MANY of the manipulations have been introduced into private education first before the plans are rolled out into the public arena.

And I suspect it worked something like this:

The heads of private schools want to be at the vanguard of educational ideas to prove how smart and forward thinking they are. They do not have bureaucracies to work through and so it is easier for them to try out the ideas they learn at summer retreats to Stanford etc…

Until the last 15 years or so one of the unique things about private ed in many cases was that teachers did not have to be credentialed or have Ed degrees. They DID have to be effective communicators and smart. These teachers were not brainwashed through the system at Columbia or University of Chicago and when the Heads of school came to them with the expectation that New Math or Group Projects should be part of the curriculum, the well meaning smart teachers said SURE!

But then they simply continued to teach the logic and facts they had always taught. Now, when they described the class to the parents they always mentioned that they were teaching kids to learn and be leaders and there would be group projects in order to placate the heads.

In point of fact, the education stayed pretty solid in private schools up until about 2000 because the teachers were not indoctrinated yet. And so the new themes and mandates were just words and so what they thought?

But beginning about 2000 what I saw taking place in Private Schools is what Robin has written an entire book and blog about. All of a sudden a hundreds years old tradition of sound, independent minded and actually rigorous education started to be destroyed from within because New Teacher hires had to be Credentialed and Tenured and Experienced educators were asked to go BACK to school to acquire the masters and doctorates in Ed that they had never needed before to teach effectively.

This is how all the language and its attendant falsehoods that had been in place since the early 1970’s but had never quite found its footing has firmly come home to roost. The language matches up with the desired implementation now as it never did before because all the educators are all firmly brainwashed.

In fact in my sons former school ( he graduated a year ago ) the purge has been completed. The last of the old school educators were either “released’ sans contract or left on their own because they knew they had no fight left in them.

My son’s class was the very last of the old way of learning. Its tragic.

Elizabeth-You may want to check out the site called Private Schools for a Public Purpose for what it is pushing. My last year of having any of my kids in private school was the year that all the Big Names in Atlanta just kept bringing Alfie Kohn to come speak to parents.

My personal experience is that parents paying either large sums in tuition OR lots of property taxes for lovely homes in in-demand suburbs have a hard time appreciating that their very financial success is what puts a bullseye on their children as far as education schools and sociology theories are concerned.

They would be sickened by how often I read an insistence now that students should not be able to benefit from their parents’ economic success or greater levels of education. The school just cannot really undo a parent who simply teaches their child to read because they know this is all going on. I once explained the economic concept of Free Riding to one of my kids frustrated by doing all the work on a group project. Tying that real frustration to an abstract concept will forever make it memorable. “That’s free riding, isn’t it, mom?”

Oh. My. Goodness… Why have I not seen that before?? I’m so frustrated right now! Grrr. I guess I need to pay attention to that in school now as well. I suppose the equity lens would need to be forced on private education. They just can’t leave anything untouched by their agenda. Late to the party on this one. Good grief.

They always leave off the part about data showing what visual experiences created what changes over time in the student and how much time it took and then aligning all that with personal characteristics of the student. Nothing has to involve personally identifiable information to be terribly useful when behavioral change is the new definition of learning.

“Games foster learning and empathy”, “Gamification is about using rewards to motivate behavior. It’s efficient when you already know exactly what you want people to do.”
The site also linked to this onehttp://www.gamesforchange.org/, Glasslab that we have discussed here before and the Minecraft educational game.

How well does this fit with being educable an not educated. How about gaming for enduring understandings or fostering social change, or the Rockefeller Communication for Social change?

Check out the Empathy dice game. It reminded me of a way to turn the delphi technique into a game. Predetermined outcome while the kiddos think they are playing a fun game instead of being told what to think or value.

LL-check out the papers on that site JT linked to this morning. Turns out the Frameworks Institute has been using groups in Boston and Portland, Oregon to be the peer groups to develop the memes to mislead us all with.

Ugh! This Design Thinking has utterly infiltrated all the private schools in the northeast. Problem solving through empathy indeed.

What is fascinating to me however is that in practice the students at the high school level are very aware that they are being played with. They do not quite see it for the deliberate manipulation that it is but they get the insincerity of the programming.

They understand that The Problem to be solved already has a solution which has been determined by someone else and they are supposed to get there on their own at which point they will be praised for working together as a group collaboratively for solving a problem for everyone!

The net effect is a student body which attends their design thinking classes angry or apathetic and dismissive. They see it as a complete waste of their time.

Mari-the high school students are coming to see most of the educators and especially the administrators as imbeciles. Frequently they are. They have been credentialed precisely because their own limits make them unlikely to ask questions.

People who play with fire because they do not know fire is hot is the classic phrasing of this problem.

I have struggled with the concept `learning how to learn` which seems empty and unnecessary. If we have the capacity to learn, which we do, why should we require an extra layer built on top of that? I think `learning how to learn` is some kind of justification for those ubiquitous transferable skills that we keep hearing about. The only transferable skills of any use as far as I understand them are reading and mathematics but they require different skill sets and knowledge bases and a logical mind. In the quest for `learning how to learn` so much valuable time is wasted in school not learning reading and maths, or anything at all.

I like the way you have shown how the concept of `critical thinking` exemplifies the method actually required to push forward the great transformational change and that it must involve education too. It is incredibly devious but quite clever. It is both subtle and obvious when you see it. I think that is why it is difficult for some people to grasp this global plan to ensnare everybody in a one world communitarian state.

What may also be helpful to you is to locate Torsten Husen’s book The Learning Society from 1974 and its sequel in 1989 Revisited since Husen is both a major architect of this global vision and one of the founders of IEA to use international assessments to help drive it. PISA is a descendant of this strategy begun by TIMSS in math and PIRLS in reading to change the very nature.

I have both books and Husen also states that all these education reforms are about driving the West towards the Marxist Humanist vision of the advanced welfare state meeting the needs of all as a matter of human right. He was Norwegian by the way so it is similar to what I wrote about Sweden and then the purpose of the Danish folk school.

The Foreword to the 1974 writes about the shift of the teacher from a dispenser of information to being a “provider of learning opportunities. So far as the curriculum is concerned the emphasis will be on the acquisition of adaptive skills—learning how to learn—rather than on ‘content’ subjects.”

Later he makes it clear that from 1957 on, as part of these welfare state reforms, he pushed the idea that “the school’s cardinal mission today is to equip pupils to cope with the information flow and not in the first place to impart solid knowledge, so called. It is therefore vital to furnish pupils with an armoury of skills that gives them this competence.”

That is Learning to Learn. To be adaptable and ready to “assimilate new knowledge on their own.” What we see in the post I wrote about the Rockefeller sponsored Communication for Social Change, in the Fostering Communities of Learners theory of desired change, the Discourse classroom, and other theories hanging around the real classroom implementation is that this becomes a DUTY to assimilate new information and to come to a common, shared understanding. Learning to Learn appears to me to be priming for a Consensus approach to daily life.

Think of it as gradually priming us for authoritarianism while having us perceive the various mandates as consensually imposed via deliberation.

Please Robin, Someone who has decided to home school ran across this while looking up information on material. She read what Ron Paul had posted on his website about common core and asked me what’s so wrong with this? They say teachers will be able to choose their subject material and that children will be still reading classics. What is a good, short, straight answer back that will explain to them the fallacy of this? http://www.ronpaulcurriculum.com/CommonCoreEnglish.pdf Thanks, Carol

Robin may give you a much better answer with links! but I can say that #1. the majority ( 70+ % ) of the “language arts” reading will be non-fiction articles and the “classics” offered will not be complete plays of Shakespeare or entire novels by Jane Austen.

The “classics” offered will consist of exerpts from these types of plays or novels and the chosen passages will be taught in a context that has a determined link to a “real life” socio-political issue.

For Instance, perhaps a student will read page or two from the Merchant of Venice and then be asked to understand how Shylock is victimized by society and then the student will be asked to find real life examples of victimized people and then she will be asked to come up with ideas about how to make life more fair for everyone?

Its all teaching to manipulate a mindset. Its not about reading the Great Works to grow the mind and the soul.

Remember early on in the blog’s history I wrote about engrenage and how all these radicals just kept using graphics of interlocking gears that together forced implementation in one way and in a single direction?

CCSSI’s purpose was to give a reason for the shift away from content tests at the state level in those states still using them. The requirements of online assessments drive the need to switch to digital media, which throws of tremendous personal data on how a student’s mind works and what he values and how he approaches situations where there is no right answer. All behavioral and social engineering gold mines.

CCSSI are performance standards. A move from the mental and factual knowledge should have been openly acknowledged and presented for debate. Instead that huge reality remains obscured in deceit with district supers actively misleading parents where I live about what now constitutes student achievement. No one but me seems to have noticed the omnipresent references this school year to “innovative learning experiences” as the new focus. It is the child being practiced on via innovations and they are behavioral in focus at that.

The idea that teachers can pick subject matter runs into the INTASC standards tied to CCSSI as well as the federal government requiring measures of effective teaching that are tied to Student Growth. As the book explains in Chapter 8 the actual implementation of CCSSI has lots of other mandates that are mostly invisible. All those are further gears.

I think Ron Paul should stick to economics where his understandings seem sound. His beliefs on education and foreign policy seem grounded more in his personal preferences about how the world should work than in knowledge of the reality guiding anyone’s druthers. This blog and my book are deeply grounded in that factual reality, even when it’s painful to read or discuss.

Hence my snarky attempts at humor or at least irony and ties to comparable historical efforts from the past and those demonstrable consequences.

amazon has it. Chapter 7 is specific to me explaining what the real implementation looks like and why it is mandatory. I am thinking like the due diligence lawyer I am by training and experience. Who has binding authority over what goes on in the classroom and what are they requiring. Part of what is so crucial about the GELP summits and the 2011 Carnegie-sponsored Competency-based summits that federal DoED officials were a part of is that they not only validated all of what I had laid out in Chapter 7, they also validated what I said the end game looked like-Competency.

Everything we discuss on this blog is augmenting what is in that book. People who have read it and this blog are finding the most magnificent supporting materials now on their own. http://www.cejournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Subbiondo.pdf is an example of what someone sent me yesterday who understood the relevance of the noosphere from the book and what I had laid out in this post.

There are lots of conferences and books and resources discussed in that book that no one has ever covered before. It makes these education reforms make sense because they have always been about broader fundamental transformations without gaining consent. They get around the huge barrier to change that is the language of the US Constitution. No other country in the West EVER gave their citizens that kind of power in writing. No wonder the power of print must be minimized in favor of emotions and the visual.

I am betting that you all already know who Charlotte Iserbyt is, but I wanted to bring her blog up. on July 31st she wrote about “critical thinking”. I have been reading Invisible Serfs Collar for awhile now and really appreciate it.

Hi Lynda. I do know Charlotte. I first came across her work back at the end of 2010 when a chance remark by a school superintendent made me realize that the Common Core was a reprise of outcomes-based education and her work came up as I began to research the tenets of OBE.

I got the chance to meet her when she was in Georgia last year working on her The Road to Ruin video. I wanted to cite that Carnegie agreement in particular because the editor of the Workplace manuals I am citing to, Anthony Carnevale, refers to himself in his bio as being a member of the Board of the National Center on Education and the Economy and that it is located at Columbia University. That of course is the same NCEE that was created by Carnegie at the same time this study began that Charlotte has focused on in her books.

As far as I know she has never looked at Carnevale but I can see that he is tying these manuals to the Carnegie agreement. I want people to begin to see that agreement, these manuals, the polytechism grants to Robert Beck going on at the same time I described in book are all a common vision. It is really about adopting the social science view of how to ground behavior that will be predictable and that requires eliminating the logical rational mind.

Where my work differs from Charlotte’s is she tends to focus more on behaviorism and I am more interested in cybernetics since all the research I have is that cybernetics from about 1970 on became the psychological means to use education to target human behavior. The actual Common Core classroom implementation is thoroughly grounded in cybernetic theory. That’s what all the references to conceptual understandings and using disciplinary lenses is about.

I think our work is complementary. David Loye by the way, who is married to Riane Eisler with her concept of the partnership society, says that cybernetics is just another word to mask the grounding of these ideas in Marxist Humanist theories. I could always see the similarity to what Ilyenkov described as Ascending from the Abstract to the Concrete and have written about Piotr Galperin as well since that is what the classroom implementation appears to be following.

The point I am making here and in the last several posts is that education is being used to gain control over both the economy and people generally in much the same way as what the USSR used to do under Five Year Plans. At least there people recognized what officials were trying to do to them. In the US and other countries in the West it is now hiding behind phrases like Learning to Learn, Workplace Readiness, College and Career Ready, and 21st century learning. All these terms though track back to creating a malleable, exploitable mind and personality via the schools.

Thanks, Robin!!
I plan to do more reading than anything else, and may be asking questions lol. I have been able to see a lot of what you are talking about in church language, as these things are in the seminaries and bible colleges as well. Francis Shaeffer talked about word definitions in the 80s and the slowly changing focus. Seems that if you disagree with a doctrine in church (if they even have a doctrine), then they just say, “we will agree to disagree”. It drives me crazy.

I watch that angle as well Lynda! Even ran into the Kairos project Robin mentioned on the blog. These thought changing efforts permeate many areas.

I expect a few battles this year, and expect to be the bad parent who asks odd questions to the private Christian school principal who also sits on the AdvanceEd board. An awkward situation indeed , especially if you are armed with facts from Robin’s book and blog.

Thanks, LL!
Everything seems to be integrated to push TQM. Churches even do that I am sure you know. I just watched two Common Core videos: One that looks like TQM in the classroom, and the other one about “writing and literature” that is nothing but social justice activism in the new “Voices” literature. They are teaching 3rd graders to think against their parents! Like they need help doing that already…

Before I state one more thing I want to be on record here that I am NOT anti semitic at all! lest anything I say be construed that way. I am making note of something that I find odd and troubling in the context of what we are discussing re the manipulation of k-12 education and beyond to create a compliant and submissive private society that bends to the will of the Public Leaders. I don’t think its as irrelevant as it seems at first glance. Then again I can be very wrong too.

This law passed by President Bush affirms that the U.S was founded upon the Seven Universal Laws of Noah or the Noahide ( Noachide ) Laws.

It is my understanding that this nation was not remotely founded upon the Seven laws Of Noah but rather that there was no State Religion. So that this law is even on the books as legitimate is something that is utterly insane to me.

I first stumbled upon this law within the context of trying understand the push for global governance. And such searches can lead a person to some pretty kooky sites. But I am learning to read carefully. Even the kooks can teach pearls of wisdom if you can get beyond the hyperbole.

When I first read this law and understood that it supported teachings that negated the existence of Christ ( because to worship Christ is to be Idolatrous ) I thought, ” well THAT is strange. And that is where I basically stayed in my thinking but when I went back to read the law Again the other day I saw this and thought , ” Ok. THAT is even weirder.”

“Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That March 26, 1991, the start of the ninetieth year of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, leader of the worldwide Lutbavitch movement. is designated as “Education Day. U.S.A.”

Education Day. I understand that this law is symbolic primarily. But somehow that seems worrisome enough. While my comprehension is admittedly limited at this stage I am also of the understanding that Communitarian Law which is increasingly replacing the constitutional laws of our nation is based on Noahide Law. ( Robin is the lawyer here, I’m stumbling along. )

I’m adding this info here not to change the direction of the conversation but rather to just put the information on people’s radar to pursue or not as they read and learn.

Mari-this answers your question from yesterday I believe. It’s the July 24, 2014 letter from the federal Departments of Education, Labor, Commerce, and HHS in implementation of WIOA and Governors cultivating business involvement in each state. http://www.doleta.gov/wioa/pdf/GOVERNOR_2014072315364400.pdf

I just read that DoEd paper ! I think Im getting it. Its awful. These planners have no concept of jobs or businesses being anything but fixed static entities. They cannot imagine anything existing beyond what exists presently. WOW.

They clearly have this creepy idea of human job seekers as being automatons who have no intrinsic value or thinking capacities of their own. We are Units who are simply waiting to be plugged into the appropriate job slated for us.

WOW.

This is horrific.These people are sociopaths. They do not like or respect humans very much despite all their fair and equal talk.

WIOA enforcement and its language will thus tie in perfectly to the NEA Care Guide language and that Aspen sponsored RETOC–Racial Equity Theory of Change.http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2488 details that Perez sees any disproportionality of outcomes as proof of discrimination. What a tool for social change WIOA will be with that mindset.

http://wdr.doleta.gov/opr/fulltext/00-wes.pdf is the Workplace Essential Skills manual put out by both then Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman and then Secretary of Education Richard Riley (who is now again Vice Chair of Carnegie Corporation, head of Education Counsel that advises CCSSO on new accountability, Competency and Next Generation Learning, and a name partner in a law firm that represents school districts) in August 2000 in the twilight of the Clinton Administration. Waiting to be implemented by a Gore administration or preserved for the next Dem administration, which is what happened. No wonder NGA wanted to reorganize the nature of high school. No wonder they are pushing sector strategies.

Mari, sometimes jobs do treat you that way! I get upset at where I work at times because they try to standardize everything to a T and when you do that, you standardize people’s behavior. The company LOVES Total Quality Management and they put a big focus on LEAN. They also love change, and change is always supposed to be good. ugh

Got to comment on a couple of things:
1) you and Charlotte Iserbyt are running on parallel rails of the same track and headed in the same direction;
2) Anthony Carnavale is cited in Iserbyt’s book, the deliberate dumbing down of america, on page 327 as being a member of the Center for Learning and Competitiveness (CLC) Advisory Board ( based in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland) related to its participation in a project entitled School-to-Work Transition in the United States: The Case of the Missing Social Partners–A Report of the Governance and Finance Team of the Comparative Learning Teams Project (1994). Very involved in funding international investigations of educational projects in Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland and the UK. He was also cited by me on page A-48 of Iserbyt’s book as being a contributor to Hornbeck and Salamon’s book Human Capital and America’s Future. Carnavale was also listed on page A-112 as a member of the National Center for Education and the Economy Board of Trustees (Marc Tucker’s group);
3) it has always fascinated me that the time frame for implementation of the sections of the Elementary and a Secondary Education Act (ESEA) is structured in five-year increments–just like the Five-Year Plans of the USSR;
4) as far as Ron Paul and his curriculum go, Mari is probably correct in her “assessment” of the contents of his curriculum. Also, he is working with Gary North of Reconstructionist fame and Tom Woods of the Austrian Economics center at Auburn University. I would want to investigate both of them thoroughly before committing to anything related to Ron Paul’s curriculum, and
5) on the video set Exposing the Global Road to Ruin through Education Sam Blumenfeld’s presentation addresses some of the information about the Rockefeller sons and the school they attended that their father endowed that crippled them for life because of Dewey’s progressive policies. He also explains the root of the Look Say Method of reading and why it created so many disfunctional readers.

Thanks CPW. I am not done with Carnevale yet. One of the books gave his version of his cv in a way I had never seen before and it is very troubling for him to be billing himself as an ‘economist.’ Only in the sense that he has always wanted the public sector to own or at least direct and control the private sector, which is precisely what these local workforce boards that are now required under WIOA and the special sector strategies all do.

Interestingly Carnevale used to be the government affairs director for AFSCME, the union for public workers at the state, county, or municipal levels and was a high school teacher and social worker in Maine before that. He also wanted it known that he was the coauthor of the principal affidavit in the Rodriguez case that sought to establish education as a fundamental right under the US Constitution. SCOTUS disagreed, but overruling Rodriguez remains a high priority for the radical Left. It ranks right up there with securing a right to economic justice under the 14th amendment. President Obama’s desire to nominate Goodwin Liu to the federal appellate courts was assuredly about trying to elevate him later to SCOTUS to get that 5th Rodriguez vote.

Please share info anytime. I think that is a crucial function of this blog and the importance will grow as this new school year commences and people begin to recognize that something fundamental has shifted.

I read about 1200 pages of these manuals before writing the previous post. There is no question that the Workplace theme is merely an excuse to limit what people are to be allowed to know and to gain stealth control over private business. It’s our job to turn the klieg lights on these nefarious ideas.

Robin, I’m curious if Frameworks Institute is on your radar. They’re partnered with all the usual suspects, Gates, Carnegie et al and are now making a presence out here in the west to explain CCSS to Californians. They even have a Toolkit to “communicate effectively about budgets and taxes. In this time of fiscal challenges, these tools offer an alternative narrative to the anti-tax rhetoric that has dominated the public conversation.” I guess this is their plan to fund this mess?! More mind control via technology. Gotta love their logo–presents a clear picture of the endgame.

So in 1956, just after the Reese Committee congressional investigations of a possible coordinated effort involving the major foundations to supposedly advance Marxist Humanism in the West with its bountiful technology ended, the Foundation Center was established to coordinate philanthropic efforts.

And in 2008 it published this paper tied http://sfa.frameworksinstitute.org/pdf/practicematters_08_paper.pdf called Communications for Social Good that just happens to magically tie into what 21st Century Learning happens to be pushing in US classrooms under what will be called the Common Core banner. It also dovetails with what will be assessed for as rigorous thinking and Higher Order Thinking and deep learning.

My goodness. Coincidences do abound. Love how they have decided how the public frames who is responsible for the problem affects who should clean it up.

Wow. Talk about confessing the link to CFSC… “At the dawn of the era of mass media, the Rockefeller Communication Seminar brought together the major social science scholars working on
communications on a monthly basis from September 1939 to June 1940. In his letter of invitation, Rockefeller Foundation program officer John
Marshall explained, “I asked for this allocation on the grounds that I was working mainly in the field of mass communications, and that in so doing
I was increasingly feeling the lack of any systematic or disciplined approach. . . . I have to confess that my own attitude toward the seminar is
rather selfish. I hope to get from it the general theoretical guidance I very much need in my work here.” Others shared Marshall’s need for an
integrative framework that would help explain, predict, and direct public opinion via mass communications. For example, in the course of the
Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored discussions, Robert Lynd “suggested that the Seminar might predict the probable trend of events, then state the
conditions under which public opinion might be guided in the public interest in regard to them.”

That was from page 45. You can see how the Constructivism in language and then math and science laid out in chapter 2 and 3 is so crucial for this kind of guiding of the sheep. Educable, not educated.

And the picture of engrenage just as I have been saying. The individual parts that then link together in predictable ways to pull in a common direction. It sounds much like the Rockefeller-funded Communication For Social Change site where it talks of getting ALL grantmakers on board with a common vision. It’s just a coordinated effort via planned engrenage though, not some type of conspiracy.

CRESST, which evaluates the Common Core ‘assessments’ to make sure they are tied to the desired ‘understandings’ and are thus the Hewlett sponsored deep learning is at UCLA I believe.

So is Howard Adelman and Linda Taylor’s School Mental Health Project that is now involved in IEL’s (remember the Ford Foundation created it and it sponsors the Ed Fellows programs from the states to create ‘common understandings’) Communities in Schools Project. SMHP asserts that schools cannot even contemplate a shift to academics until it has met all students physical and emotional needs. Sounds just like Martha Nussbaum’s view of welfare as a human right and community responsibility.

Thanks. I am getting a first rate common understanding of all this, but mine is grounded in lots of facts and located declarations of intent. No one assigned it to me. We may be in the process of forging a consensus on this but again it has been grounded in a great deal of factual illustrations of what I mean.

“How does learning happen? Experts have a complex model of learning that includes a focus on fluency, application, rehearsal, intrinsic motivation and feedback. In contrast, public thinking is structured by people’s experiences with the traditional instructional system — in short, a one-way and passive model of learning. Implication: We need to inoculate against passive conceptions of the brain as a container and learning as a conduit of knowledge from teachers’ to students’ brains. These ways of thinking about skills stand in the way of innovations in curriculum design, classroom design, scheduling and other areas, and undergird outdated factory-industrial models of education. The skills metaphor inoculates against these conceptions.”

Mari-the amount of conscious manipulation being confessed in that report and that all this is in pursuit of creating support for “progressive education” policies and practices is a hoot. Notice that Nellie Mae is also behind the Competency Frameworks push, Hewlett is the related deeper learning, and NoVo is tied to the recent CASEL paper on “The Missing Piece” I linked to several weeks ago that involved Warren Buffett’s daughter in law.

It also reminded me of Donald Schon, Mr Action Research and MIT Urban Planning prof, and his advocacy for Generative Metaphors. He and that phrase even have tags on the blog.

Weaving Skill Ropes confesses the importance of an image that people can relate to in their daily lives that they will then transfer to using in inapt situations. That’s what makes cybernetics such a reliable keel for predicting future behavior. I was a good student in college and law school and part of doing A+ work is coming up with your own superb metaphors. Here everyone is to be using the supplied metaphor so they behave in predictable fashions designed to fit with taking action for fundamental transformations or at least not complaining about the transformative actions of others going on around them.

Puts all the current hype on the “lack of skills for employer needs” into context too. That changes K-12 and brings major employers into workforce boards that allow a dirigiste vision for the economy. Busy employers may not recognize what they have signed on to, but the local Chamber of Commerce, community organizers, poli sci majors now working as legislative chiefs of staff all do and on we roll. There was a lot of info in the sector strategy and cte for all post but all this fits. Educable, not educated is the needed mindset when political power frames what anyone can do and what all must do.

Last night I was doing some searching on ways that the old magic circle teaching method is being used in current times. I cam across this power point presentation. It states games help foster “learning and empathy”. Games also focus on “Civic learning” modeling real-world systems. “Gamification is about using rewards to motivate behavior. It’s efficient when you already know exactly what you want people to do.” How well does that fit with being educable, and social change! The game of “Democracy” where you can deal with climate change, and unemployment, perhaps develop some empathy so that you are more apt to consider the need for the needs economy, and develop some shared understanding.

I’ve been perseveration upon the public sector lording it over the private sector and I was wondering the following:

Could you provide any examples of or even likely hypotheticals you can envision of how these newly mandated local workforce boards will affect how small business owners operate their enterprises?

I ask because my husband and I are small business owners. Franchise owners of a national restaurant brand. Our stores are in rural/ quasi farming communities. There used to be more manufacturing but well….you know the deal.

What do you think will be mandated for us in our hiring practices if we keep headed in our current trajectory ?

That ACT link and how Qualifications Frameworks work in other countries coupled to my own experience counseling small business owners tells me that the regulators have no idea what makes business work. Most connected people in the private sector come from Big Business. That’s why hospital, utilities, defense contractors, or tech company execs are who is the face of business. Or trade groups that live off dues and have no idea how to cultivate a market, worrying about overhead, or taking less to ensure payroll.

When I first encountered QF’s as where Transformational OBE led to, the language from Australia made me think the public sector does not know that businesses cannot exist to provide jobs. Jobs exist in response to demand.

I have thought about this a lot as the pressure builds to provide credentials that mean little. I think the pressure builds to have a workforce that fits with the % of various groups in the workplace and the fact that someone is unlikely to be a good worker ceases to be a valid reason not to ‘train’ them for the job. As if the business owner or manager had nothing else to do.

Making payroll or woorying about it is a crucible experience that has created much propserity now being taken for granted. It is increasingly rare now though.

Oh, yes. Remember I still have not explained the cogniscope, online communities of inquiry, where the Club of Rome really wanted to go and how it guides education and policy planning now.

http://www.woodviewlearning.com/node/4 shows SDD in the classroom under yet another name–Guided Dialogue. The manipulation described in those reports and the admissions that it is all to pursue “progressive goals.” From our knowledge of Dewey we know that is not a better way to learn. The complaints about people still pusuing an individualist concept of learning and wanting to reject individual success in favor of a functional society. The DML papers created for the MacArthur Foundation, which has already stated in its Connected Learning papers that its DML work is about Marxist Humanism in its description of the new hoped for society. The exhortation NOT to use the term “digital media” and the complaint that people thought laptops were about a faster, more comprehensive textbook.

JT’s Goldmine fits perfectly with the cybernetic mindset being cultivated in school. Thanks to David Loye and yesterday’s post we now can link (actually I already could since Michael Cole of CHAT, Ann Brown of Fostering Communities of Learners, and Courtney Cazden of Discourse Classroom all admit their respective ideas binding today’s classrooms were a product of a trip to the USSR) all these collaboration and required consensus achieved via classroom ‘dialogue’ to what has classically been the dialectical tool needed by collectivist societies. It forces a common Worldview in a manner that seems more consensual than you must believe this as a creed and you may not read that.

The FrameWorks Institute wants to propagandize while using the more invisible techniques of the behavioral science research.

Thanks everyone for all of the additional links and insights regarding Frameworks. In Ca our state superintendent, Tom Torlakson, has recently announced Frameworks as the new toolkit to help educators explain CC. Had I not read your book, Robin, I would have missed relevance of this and it’s relation to the larger agenda embedded in the standards. I’d like to believe that if more folks understood the current ed reform for the bait and switch it is–we could push it back into hiding (well, until the next time). The more I read, however, the more I wonder if there’s too much already in place? Regardless, I’m starting my own local messaging campaign–and my Toolkit is this blog! I think I’ll start with a definition a week, explaining the true meaning behind each catch phrase / buzz word. If anyone wants to send me words that must make the list, let me know. What we have that they can’t afford is transparency.

I write this blog now as if people have read the book. Too many moving parts not to. Five years from now, that book will remain the foundation for appreciating what is being sought and why. In the early days of the blog I concentrated on areas that complemented what the book explained. Just reading the blog means people are missing the fundamental overarching framework. Except I footnote and do not try to manipulate the reader.

Let’s face it, the goals are manipulative enough. I loved it though in the Core Story paper when it fessed up that “innovative learning experiences” are necessary to gain the implementation of “progressive” policies. John Dewey continues to cast a long shadow over the 21st century to say nothing of Uncle Karl with advocates eager to try again with the new tools of the behavioral sciences and supercomputers. This time they believe (and Big History creator David Christian has said so) that grafting MH to societies with high levels of technology from having gone through capitalism means success.

I think it is extraordinarily dangerous to try to keep our eyes averted from so many open declarations of damning intent.

Robin, you will definitely not be earning any badges for “soft skills”–I’m fairly certain you’d need to be sent far away to a FINNISH re-education camp before that could happen and there would, of course, be talk of a possible frontal lobotomy.

Yes, the extraordinary danger is clear to me now that the big picture is in place. Post book, I saw how the pieces I’d been looking into–educational data mining, learning analytics, gaming, digital curricula–fit and so much more. Once I saw this reform through the “declarations of damning intent,” it got easier to act, to speak at board meetings, to contact elected officials, to warn parents. I’ll tell you what, once this reform is exposed, I’ll personally see to it that you get your badge 🙂